Adam Conover Talks Los Angeles Primaries
The Los Angeles primary is steadily approaching with election day on June 7. There’s a lot that Angelenos might not know about the process according to Adam Conover, a comedian who hosted the show “Adam Ruins Everything” on TruTV and created a brand-new comedy-documentary series about how the government works, “The G Word,” on Netflix.
The L.A. primary, explained Conover, functions differently than the primaries in every other American city. In most primaries, there are separate races for Democrats and Republicans, and the winners from each party run against each other in the general election. However, candidates in L.A. all compete against each other, regardless of political affiliation, in a nonpartisan primary.
“That's true of the mayor, it's true of the city council,” Conover said. “There is a final rule that if any one of those candidates wins over 50 percent of the vote, then they automatically win the seat and the general election is entirely skipped.”
Conover is concerned that not many Angelenos are aware of the 50 percent threshold, which he attributes to sparse coverage from major media outlets such as the LA Times. That rule has come into effect in the past when Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti won the 2017 mayoral primary with over 50 percent of the vote and skipped the general election.
Conover encourages those undecided to vote in the primary. “If you skip this election, because you are undecided, you're like, ‘oh, just wait until the general election,’ there might not be a general election,” he said. “You might have allowed everyone else to choose the mayor for you.”
One candidate, Rick Caruso, is a contender who Conover believes will hurt the city as mayor. In a Twitter thread posted on May 13, Conover encouraged Angelenos to vote for any other candidate so Caruso would not pass the 50 percent threshold. The thread was retweeted over ten thousand times and shared across other social media platforms.
According to Conover, the candidate who wins the position of Los Angeles mayor holds a lot of power. The mayor appoints members to boards and commissions across all areas of public infrastructure. Additionally, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) reports to the mayor. The mayor also puts forward a budget on how Los Angeles should spend its billions of tax dollars.
“One of the things that Caruso says that he wants to do is to increase the police force by 1500 officers,” Conover said. “Now, that's incredibly expensive, and the police currently are not able to even staff the number of positions they currently have. So it's difficult to know how he would do it.”
Another major issue in the city is that thousands of residents in Los Angeles experience homelessness. Conover characterized Caruso’s platform towards homelessness as moving the unhoused residents of Los Angeles to a desert facility “like the kind they use to warehouse immigrant kids.” “Based on the work that I've done on homelessness, I'm really worried about that plan,” he said. “I think that's not an effective way to treat homelessness, and I think it really will hurt a lot of people.”
Additionally, according to Conover, Caruso has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to anti-abortion causes in the past. With the leaked Supreme Court draft indicating a possible overturning of Roe v. Wade, Conover thinks that people in neighboring states such as Nevada and Arizona may look to Los Angeles and the rest of California to receive abortions.
“I believe that we want Los Angeles County to be a place that supports abortion,” he said. “That makes sure that we have open access to it to as many people as possible, and I think the mayor can play a role in making that happen.
Conover believes that the 63-year-old Caruso cannot genuinely change from Republican to Democrat, which Caruso registered as in 2022.
“He's in the front row of the 2015 Republican debate, he made sure,” Conover said. “It was Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and all those guys. They're all talking about who loves guns the most, who hates abortion the most. Rick Caruso made sure he had a front row seat to that event.”
Conover recommended that voters look at a guide from Knock-LA’s website, a local independent news publication, to inform themselves about the candidates before they cast their ballot.
“Part of my new show, ‘The G word’ on Netflix, in the last episode of it, Episode Six, called ‘Change,’ we talked about how local politics is almost more important than national politics,” he said. “People get so upset about what is happening on cable news in Congress, right? Or with the presidency, when the reality is your vote goes so much more further at home, because so many less people vote in that election.”
Conover highlighted city councilors as a local position which holds a lot of power. Two candidates who Conover described as having “really exciting campaigns” are Eunisses Hernandez in Los Angeles Council District 1 and Hugo Soto-Martínez in Los Angeles Council District 13.
